Displaying build times in Visual Studio?

Question

Menu Tools → Options → Projects and Solutions → VC++ Project Settings → Build Timing should work.

Go to Tools → Options → Projects and Solutions → Build and Run → MSBuild project build output verbosity - set to "Normal" or "Detailed", and the build time will appear in the output window.

Visual Studio 2012 - 2019

• For MSBuild Projects (e.g. all .Net-Projects):
  Click Tools -> Options and then select Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run. Change MSBuild project build output verbosity to Normal. So it will display Time Elapsed in every Solution Project it builds. But there is unfortunatily no Elapsed Time Sum over all project. You will also see the Build started Timestamp

• FOR C/C++ Project:

Click Tools -> Options and then select Projects and Solutions -> VC++ Project Settings.

Change Build Timing to Yes.

I have created an extension to measure the build times and present the order of events in a graph: Visual Studio Build Timer.

It is available on visual studio market place and works for VS2015, VS2017 and VS2019.

Apart from showing which projects take longer, the chart displays effectively dependencies between them, i.e. projects that need to wait for others, which helps figuring out what dependencies need to break to increase the parallelization of your build.

For Visual Studio 2012 you could use the Build Monitor extension.